La lisière

I have just seen La Lisière at Fantastik Filmfestival in SE-Lund, and I was really very, very impressed and surprised. The film made me feel at unease and unsettled but it was all done with great subtlety, and both pictures and actors were outstanding. Especially the young actors show an intensity in their interpretations of their roles that is quite amazing. But also Melvil Poupaud is impressing in the role of the doctor and makes a very naked and skinless portrait of a man who is about to loose the control over his life. Who start to step into a spiral towards self destruction. Among the subtleties of the film is that we do not really know if he has passed lines that he must not pass as a doctor and grown up man in the relation to the young patients. At the same time the film shows a closed community but with no clear borders for the children, who are making their own troubling night rituals in the surrounding forest. This is a film with the same qualities as the films of Robert Bresson, and it is not surprising to read that the director has assisted Claire Denis before. I am sure that this is the start of very important filmmaking by Géraldine Bajard. It will be exciting to follow her future work!

La lisière is an amateurishly made movie with awful dialogue and the actors sometimes just stand and stare at each other with no direction whatsoever. The actors in the scenes say one sentence, then stare at the others, or, as in one of the many laughable sequences (the main character drives one of the city girls home), don't say anything, although they should have to. Not very authentic (I guess that was the purpose), but mostly incompetent.